I had never seen New York City at Christmas time, and one night I was visiting my parents and we started talking about the Metropolitan Opera and what was playing there. Turned out there was a production of "La Boheme" that my Dad was interested in seeing, but my mother didn't want to go with him. I decided I would go because I hadn't been to the Met in a long time and because I had never been to NYC at Christmas time. So the two of us planned a last minute trip.
Thurs, Day 1: Dad didn't feel like spending the money to fly. He doesn't mind driving long distances and so we rented a car for the drive so Ma would still have her car. It was a nice large sedan so was very comfortable for the long ride. We didn't run into any traffic delays except for one that was only about 15 minutes on the way down, and we actually arrived at the hotel around 2:30, about a 7 hour drive including a stop for lunch. Weather was good all the way down.
We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel, after Teddy. It had a nice lobby that was decorated really festively for Christmas. Our room was plenty big enough. I realized after we got there that I had forgotten to pack a little evening bag. Usually this is something you can do without, but not if you're going to the opera at the Met. So we went over to Grand Central, about a two minute walk, and a lady directed us to a store with affordable things. I bought a little black sequined bag for $15. We ended up not being hungry at all and we headed out at 6:00 to go to the opera. We left early because it was starting to rain, was a little chilly and they were expecting a transit strike so we weren't sure how hard it would be to get a cab. It did indeed take a while to get a cab but we did manage to get to the opera house a little after 7:00. I took pictures of the Christmas tree outside decorated with ornaments of lighted musical instruments. The chandeliers in the lobby were very pretty. It is hard to describe what it looked like, but it reminded me of fireworks. I managed to take one photo before the lobby attendant ordered me to stop taking pictures. (Here it is.)
We had decent seats up in the top balcony and could see fine. "La Boheme" is not one of my favorite operas. I think the story is pretty lame and the music not that great (though it is the basis for one of the most successful Broadway shows ever, "Rent". Go figure.) But it was worth the price of admission just to see Act 2. This is the Franco Zefferelli production. Act 2 opens out in the street and café. It was a two level set with the street at the second level and foreground and the café on the first level. They must have had about 200 extras on stage, all in period costumes, all choreographed, with wagons and horses, etc. It was really great. It was one of those moments where when the curtain opened up on this I just let out a gasp when I first saw it. Eventually, a parade of soldiers came through too, down from the second level to the first and then off stage.After the opera, we checked out the little museum downstairs, then we got a car to take us back to the hotel because it was pouring rain. The cab ride on the way up Dad had paid the guy $16 (it was a $11 ride and he kept tipping everybody $5) so when one of those hired cars came by and offered to take us back for $20, I jumped at that. For just another $4 we got immediate service in a comfortable luxury sedan that actually had shocks and struts. This same rain storm arrived in Maine on Friday morning as snow, which then turned to rain. Guess it caused quite a mess here, and I found my driveway to be a sheet of ice when I got back on Sunday.
Fri, Day 2: On Friday we got up and had a very large breakfast in the hotel, then headed down to Times Square. That's where the people had turned out for radio "shock jock" Howard Stern's farewell (good riddance). But the cop's horses were nice. And I went into Sephora and bought $104 worth of stuff. Whenever I go to NYC, I go to Sephora because we don't have one here at home. I bought a little travel make up brush set and a make up palette. These have been very handy on subsequent trips (Dublin, Ireland and Italy and Florida in 2006) as they are all the make up and tools I have to bring but are nicely sized to not take up much room in a bag.
Then we went to Madame Tussaud's. I had last been there in 2003 and it has improved since then. They now have a historical room, which was good, since they had nothing but celebrities before. I thought that Franklin Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln, and Billy Graham looked really good. Jackie Kennedy looked good too, and was taller than I expected. These figures look much better in person when they are properly lit, than in flash photos. They even look good when you get right up close, and it's a fun museum because you can touch them. The light from a flash photo reveals that they are wax figures, after all. But George Clooney looked really good, and Morgan Freeman, Dan Rather. They had a Yoko Ono too. Anyway, the NYC equivalent to London's "chamber of horrors" is a walk through the "House of Wax", a horror movie that was current at the time of the visit. I did happen to see it on video recently and Paris Hilton gets a steel rod through the head. So you go through and there are wax figures in there but also live people made up to look like wax figures, and they jump out and scare you and bang on things and it's dark and creepy. Surprised I went through it? Well, they said at the beginning that the people inside would not touch you so I wasn't scared, and you do get some frights when they jump out at you. I think they probably have a lot of fun in there because some of them are not hiding so you look at them and look at them and finally think they're wax, and then they move, and then you expect the wax ones to move and they're really wax. So it's fun. I guess before the "House of Wax" it was based on the "Van Helsing" Hugh Jackman vampire movie. In the cafeteria, they had an "American Idol" stage set and a wax Simon Cowell and there was a teenage girl up there doing some bad karaoke. But we all gave her a big hand. I enjoyed it all, as I always do Tussaud's.
We then went over to Rockefeller Center and checked out the famous Rockefeller Christmas tree and ice skating rink. Then we went into the GE Building and they said the observation deck was newly re-opened so we went on up. We went to the very top of the building, which just had the railing. I took a photo of Dad up there and you can see it's just the railing and air – was pretty windy. The levels that are a couple of floors below have the glass surrounding them. Not too many people went the rest of the way up with us. It's not really that much farther though, just an escalator ride and another flight of stairs. It's an incredible view of the city all the way around. I tried to take a few photos of the street below, as it is so far down. I couldn't get a good shot of my favorite NYC building, the Chrysler Building, because it was blocked from view by the Met Life building. Oh well. After we were done up there, we had the elevator ride down. The elevator ceiling is clear glass so you can see the elevator shaft when you look up and how fast you go up and down, down being scarier of course. It was really fast though, with ears popping.
We just had time to get some drinks before going over to Radio City Music Hall. We just weren't hungry for lunch, so we got in line to go in. In front of us was this little family which obviously had money. The mom had a fur coat, hair and make up very done, the husband in the business suit and on the cell, teenage son in a suit, little girl maybe 7 or so all dressed up with curled hair and jeweled headband and in a dressy winter coat. Actually, saw a lot of little girls in dressy winter coats in NYC, and also a lot of the women wear nice winter hats and there are a lot of hats being sold in the stores.
In Radio City the lobby was really beautiful. It was basically red and gold, with the gold being the chandeliers and lighting and rest being red, and with all the Christmas decorations it was just gorgeous. The Tree was very very nice. We were in the top balcony for the show there but could see just fine. We went there because Dad had never been, and I didn't really expect much. But I was so happily surprised by how much I enjoyed the show. I would love to see it again. They start out with these two organs on each side of the stage at which two organists were playing Christmas carols during the seating before the show. When they were done, the organs slid back into this recessed area and the little curtains closed. Then the show started with the live orchestra rising up in the front of the stage on an underground elevator. Then there was a 3D movie of Santa on his sleigh ride (3D specs included in the program). Then the Rockettes did their opening number, and actually it was really something to watch them and their tapping. Then they did their own version of Clara from the Nutcracker dreaming of opening up many very large gifts (also came up on another elevator farther back on stage) which were all various types of teddy bears. They included some panda bears on bikes. These were all people in costumes who really danced well even though they were in slightly oversized heads. There were also 3 bunnies that came out of a hat (they were baby bunnies) and got some carrots, really cute. It was very cute and entertaining. The stuff on stage is always moving because there are various parts of the stage that move up and down, side to side, front to back and in a circle, so you have the expected moving of choreographed dancing but also sets and the floor moving as part of the choreography. It's all very cool. And it all keeps moving, not a lull between scenes at all but they just segue into the next one for the entire 90 minute show, start to finish. Just perfect precision with all kinds of moving parts and people. Then there was the famous Rockettes doing the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. This was just excellent (you can check out video from the show at http://www.radiocity.com/eventcalendar/home). Then they did a scene to explain how Santa can deliver gifts all over the world – there's many Santas and they did a big number which also included many more Santas on a movie screen behind which were choreographed with the live Santas in front. Then they did a scene about snow in NY and up the front elevator came a skating rink with a pair of figure skaters, which was supposed to be Rockefeller's rink. And during all these various scenes the orchestra moved around too, front to back, and sometimes up and down the elevator. Then there was the North Pole Santa's workshop with Mrs. Claus and elves and they had forgotten to make a doll for one little girl and ended up having some glitch in the machines which made a whole bunch of dolls – however many Rockettes there are actually, and then they also ended up back on the scene as reindeer whose antlers lit up. Then they ended with a Living Nativity, which included a ton of visitors to the Christ-child and animals including camels and donkeys, and it was all lit really well. It was just super!
After the show, we went back to 30 Rock to check things out at night, and the Tree there looked just great. We decided to eat early supper in the downstairs café which sits level with the ice rink and we watched the people skate. We even saw them zamboni the ice too. It's a small rink so a smaller zamboni. On the walk back to the hotel we checked out the Saks windows which were really nice, and Dad checked out mass times at St. Patrick's. We sure squeezed a lot into this day and were pretty pooped out and back in the hotel room by about 7:30.
Sat, Day 3: We actually got a bit of a late start and ended up eating breakfast up the street at a café, then checked out the Chrysler Building. My camera batteries died so I had to go buy some more and come back to take pictures. Apparently on the weekend they don't staff it to allow people to actually come into the lobby so I couldn't go beyond a certain point and had to take the pictures from there. It was all very Art Deco, which I just love. The ceiling is actually painted canvas, and the walls all marble, and the deco decoration and lighting was all very cool. They had a very nice Tree too.
Then we took a cab up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This place was huge. I checked out the costume gallery, which was a special exhibit of high fashion collection of Iris Apefel. I guess they have such a large costume collection that the exhibit rotates, so I didn't get to see any period costumes, just this haute couture collection of various designers. Some of it was interesting and some not. We visited the Egyptian exhibits including mummies and sarcophagi (plural?) and a little exhibit on Egyptian medicine, and a totally recreated Temple of Dendur. This was in a big room surrounded by windows so all the natural light came in and it was like being outside. I visited all the Chinese and Japanese exhibits, and they had a Japanese sitting room and a Chinese courtyard which was quite nice. They also have recreated many period rooms out of colonial times, and fancy turn of the century rooms from European hotels and American mansions, and a really nice Frank Lloyd Wright room.
There was also a cool photography exhibit related to the spiritualists and mediums and all the trickery they used in the early days of photography. The scam artists always find a way to use new technology to take advantage. We also checked out all the armor and armaments. We saw some actual armor for Henry VIII that was made late in his life and he actually wasn't so very fat really, just a bit but honestly, in America today, there's a whole lot of people much bigger than him. Here they have the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. It's really huge and quite dynamic actually. We checked out Musical Instruments too. These are always quite fascinating, as I find it interesting how humans could envision and create complex instruments only to make sound and music. These are not really "useful", but over centuries and millenniums humans need music and art. And we had a pretty good lunch at the museum restaurant.
But the highlight really was the Christmas Tree with all the angels on it, and the nativity surrounding it. It was a Neapolitan nativity collection. It has been displayed many Christmas seasons at the museum, and is set up by the daughter of the woman who owned it. All the figures surround the tree and they are villagers and travelers with houses and carts and markets. It was a joy to look at. Here is a picture from the museum's web site, and they describe it as: "A vivid 18th-century Neapolitan Nativity scene—embellished with a profuse array of diminutive, lifelike attendant figures and hovering, silk-robed angels—adorns the candlelit spruce. Recorded music adds to the enjoyment of the holiday display."
Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Creche at NY Metropolitan Museum of Art
After the museum, we went to Grand Central again and checked out a holiday fair and got some coffee. Sunday morning, Dad went off to St. Patrick's. We then took a walk to get some breakfast, and this is the only time NYC seemed a little bit quiet, Sunday morning, with minimal people out and about and much lighter traffic. We checked out of the hotel and were on the road by 9:00 a.m., arriving home at 3:00, so made really good time back and it was an easy ride with good weather and no traffic issues.
Really an excellent little vacation. Christmastime in NYC really is nice. All the Christmas Trees everywhere we went were just so pretty. For me, I think the highlight was that Radio City show. Boy was that fantastic.
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